Welcome to the blogspot of HEAL, the Hospital Equity & Access Lobby in the Blue Mountains, near Sydney. This page exists to give our community access to information and updates regarding the delivery of services at Blue Mountains District ANZAC Memorial Hospital. Sadly, in recent years our hospital has reduced the range of basic, primary health care services it provides to Mountains residents.
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Sunday, August 15, 2010

NSW medical students are demanding the federal government stop increasing university places after more than 100 graduates failed to get internships in public hospitals this week.

The crisis comes three years after the government increased university places to solve the state's crippling shortage of doctors, but failed to employ extra staff in NSW hospital to supervise interns.

About 115 international students, who each paid more than $200,000 for their degrees, were told yesterday they would have to wait until Friday for final offers but there was little chance they would be employed, forcing many of them to return home.

''The intern year is a 12-month period of postgraduate training that is required for general medical registration,'' the president of the Sydney University Medical Society, Jon Noonan, said. ''Without it, a medical degree is not worth the paper it is printed on.

"At this point last year more than two-thirds of locally trained internationals had been offered an internship within NSW. The fact that none have been placed has come as a shock to our colleagues, who had been repeatedly reassured they would be taken care of,'' he said.

A spokeswoman for the Institute of Medical Education and Training, which allocates internships, said 747 positions were available this year, more than enough for the state's 685 graduates, but NSW had been swamped by applicants from other states.

Last year, when the same problem occurred, the government invoked a priority system because it did not have enough money to offer internships to all graduates wanting to work in NSW.

Under that system, international students trained in NSW are only offered positions once all Australians and New Zealanders trained in Australia and overseas-trained applicants are employed, a decision that has angered the Australian Medical Students Association.

''We have a government which provides huge incentives to get these doctors back once they have left [Australia] and it seems illogical to me to do so when we have people who've been trained here to our standards,'' its president, Ross Roberts-Thomson, said.

''A medical degree qualifies you for nothing but an internship. If you don't get an internship, you essentially have a piece of paper which allows you to drive a taxi - or not even that.''

Mr Noonan agreed, saying it defied logic that state and federal governments would shut the door on Australian-trained international students while relying on foreign-trained doctors to fill gaps in the health workforce.

Mr Noonan said his group wanted the state government to guarantee internships to all graduates in NSW and join with other states to adopt a consistent and co-ordinated framework for intern allocations.

Two years ago, the Minister for Health, Nicola Roxon, said she was aware clinical training places were ''a pressure point within the system'' but the government had no plans to cut university places for medical students.

''This was a crisis that was always going to happen,'' the former chief executive of the Australian Medical Association, Bill Coote, said yesterday.

''There has been very rapid growth in the number of medical schools and the expansion of existing schools - and there is the parallel issue of how medical schools have been allowed to attract full-fee paying students to subsidise their activities when we can't provide all graduates with appropriate training.''

Primary Health Care

"There is hardly any health system reform in developed countries in the past five years which has not given PHC higher relative importance…It is clear that PHC continues to be a fundamental component of health policy, and of health systems, in most of the world." (WHO 2003)